By John Maguire, Director, EMEA, APTelecom
Submarine cables are the invisible, indispensable arteries of the global digital economy. Spanning more than 1.4 million kilometers across ocean floors, these fiber-optic cables carry more than 99% of all intercontinental internet traffic. Historically, their deployment has followed a market-led model, where infrastructure investment was determined by projected telecommunications market needs, usually calculated by national or multinational carriers, regional consortia, and multilateral financiers.
In recent years, however, a profound shift has occurred. Submarine cables are no longer just responses to measured and anticipated demand of geographic or vertical telecom markets; rather, cables are being designed, financed, and deployed based on the demand projections of the platforms they support.
The new paradigm is defined by large technology firms—particularly by well-known hyperscale cloud and content platforms—whose businesses, and therefore whose infrastructure strategies, are completely different from those of telecom operators, and which have reshaped the submarine cable market in ways that we are, perhaps, yet to understand.
This shift has far-reaching implications for market structure, infrastructure governance, and digital sovereignty. Here, we identify the drivers of the changing paradigm, explore some of its structural implications, and consider the question of balancing private initiative with public interest.
Defining Market and Platform
It is important to define one’s terms, even in an article as brief as this.
When we consider the market paradigm, we speak of international traffic streams. In subsea cable terms (as elsewhere, e.g., in satellite), the focus was initially on voice, evolving to be data led (i.e., as in ‘data service’: IPLC, X.25, ATM, etc.) and typically based on telcos’ multiple bilateral streams of traffic, later evolving to be internet led, and beginning to drift slightly away from geographical streams and bilateralism towards hubs and their communities.
Platforms, on the other hand, are the infrastructure upon which hyperscale providers aggregate their services. Consider, for example, a single provider offering search, a video service, a mobile operating system ecosystem, cloud computing and advertising; or another that offers a suite of social networking applications targeting different global market segments, a leading global messaging/unified communications application, and advertising.
From Market to Platform: A Historical Context
In the market-led era, submarine cables were developed to meet observed or projected growth in international bandwidth requirements.
National telecom operators, often at least partly government-owned, and generally operating under strict regulatory mandates or national development goals, including universal service obligations, led these investments. Projects were cooperatively financed via consortium models, through which multiple carriers shared total capacity to optimize risk and utilization, each according to appetite.
This model promoted broad participation and, generally, geographical inclusivity. Multilateral development institutions like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and others, often supported cable systems to underserved regions. The exponential rise in global internet traffic, however, driven by cloud computing, data replication, artificial intelligence (AI), and video streaming, has not only outpaced traditional planning cycles, it has also taken traffic from the old ‘market-to-market’ international telco environment into the realm of the ‘platform-to-eyeball’. The largest wholesale consumers of international bandwidth are no longer telecom carriers but hyperscale technology platforms.
This shift also reflects a deeper transformation in the internet’s architecture—from a decentralized model driven by interconnection and collaboration to a platform-centric model dominated by vertically integrated ecosystems.
In this context, submarine cables become not just infrastructure, but strategic enablers of digital platform dominance.
Control over international connectivity translates into greater leverage over cloud markets, content delivery and, at some level, even regulatory compliance.
Implications of the Paradigm Shift
The consolidation of cable ownership among a few tech giants risks greatly centralizing control over global data flows. While this probably improves operational efficiency in general, it only benefits participating firms and also raises concerns about access and pricing transparency. Internet service providers (ISPs), telcos, and everyone else becomes a price-taker with limited negotiating power.
There is also a risk of infrastructure nationalism, where governments may overcompensate by tightening control over cable landings, data localization, or cross-border flows. We see a parallel at the end-user level in respect of attempts to control, and tax, digital services, such as social networking. While these policies may aim to protect sovereignty, they may also reduce global efficiency and raise costs. The tension between open global infrastructure and sovereign control may define the next phase of submarine cable geopolitics.
Balancing Private Innovation and Public Interest
So, what can governments do? Governments and development finance institutions can mandate open-access principles for cables landing on national territory. By requiring that part of the capacity be made available on fair and transparent terms, regulators can promote inclusivity and competition.
- Countries can collaborate to pool investments in strategic routes, creating public or cooperative cable systems. Shared ownership lowers entry barriers and distributes risks. We see evidence of this approach in the European Union’s digital infrastructure consortium.
- International bodies like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and World Bank can work toward updated legal norms and soft governance tools.
- Governments could treat cable landing stations (CLS) as critical infrastructure, ensuring security, redundancy, and open interconnection. There is, frankly, a long way to go in this regard in less liberal markets, worldwide.
We have evidence for a welcome way forward, avoiding the identified pitfalls, from Google’s already referenced recent and ongoing activities in the Pacific Ocean, ensuring that its massive Pacific Ocean building program, in the vicinity of some of the smallest and remotest populations in the world, provides an opportunity for these often marginalized communities to participate. It’s a model driven not by a platform, or indeed a market; it is driven by meeting the previously unsatisfied needs of real people maintaining an island-based way of life. It’s an approach that could deliver all-around benefits elsewhere, if it could be adopted more widely.
Conclusion
The changing submarine cable paradigm reflects broader shifts in how digital infrastructure is conceived, financed, and controlled. The move from market- to platform-driven development is not just a technical evolution, it is a business, financial, regulatory, and perhaps even a geopolitical revolution.
While hyperscalers have brought unprecedented investment and innovation to global connectivity, their growing dominance poses risks. The challenge is to ensure that the infrastructure order remains inclusive, resilient, and accountable.
The submarine cable network may lie beneath the ocean’s surface, but the forces shaping it are anything but hidden. Understanding and managing this paradigm shift is essential for building an equitable, global digital future.
